Friends, Fellow Activists Honor Actor John Randolph

If tributes tend to reflect the people they are about, John Randolph can’t complain.

The luncheon Sunday for the Tony award-winning actor (“Broadway Bound”) and social and union activist had elements rarely found in such events: spontaneity, brevity, wit.

Close to 400 people jammed the roof garden of the Sheraton-Universal for the chance to root for the once-blacklisted performer who was one of the hand-picked Americans invited to meet with Soviet secretary general Mikhail Gorbachev at the Soviet Embassy during the Washington summit. “I kept looking to see, were there other radicals like me invited?,” said Randolph. “And then I saw Henry Kissinger. . . . We all looked like a bunch of character actors looking for a job.”

Emcee Roscoe Lee Browne recalled his first meeting with Randolph some 30 years ago, “arms outstretched, one to shake your hand and the other clutching a petition.”

Ellen Geer and her sister Melora Marshall (daughters of the late blacklisted activist Will Geer) sang a song of “sisterhood for Central America” dedicated to Randolph’s late wife and activist partner Sarah Cunningham, and Jean Donovan, one of four lay churchwomen murdered in El Salvador.

Speakers included actors Eli Wallach, Dennis Weaver and Sumi Haru, recording secretary for the Screen Actors Guild, who said she had been “personally instructed by Randolph in how to carry a picket sign.” Others paying tribute were the Mark Taper Forum’s Gordon Davidson, Esai Morales and James Whitmore, who recounted a phone conversation with Randolph’s mother the day he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee: “Jimmy,” she said to Whitmore, “he was the funniest one there . . . “

A fund-raiser for the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship of which Randolph is the newly elected chair, the event drew Soviet musicians and film makers also. Leonid Serebrenikov and Alexander Katenin serenaded Randolph in Russian and film makers Karen Shakhnazarov and Vladimir Menshov (“Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears”) spoke.

“What I love is that every phase of my life is represented by the people I see here,” Randolph said when it was his turn at the podium.

Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs may have best echoed the prevailing mood when he presented Randolph with a proclamation declaring Sunday as “John Randolph Day’: “It kind of makes you a believer again.”